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IMPROVED SOURCE APPORTIONMENT AND SPECIATION OF LOW-VOLUME PARTICULATE MATTER SAMPLES
Impact/Purpose:
As particulate air pollution has increasingly been associated with adverse human health effects, interest has been growing in studying the chemical composition of inhalable particulate matter (PM) and how exposures to its specific constituents are associated with health effects. Much of the general characterization of the composition of PM has been performed on specimens collected by high-volume samplers. Personal sampling, although it improves exposure estimation, makes use of small-scale equipment that traditionally could not collect a sufficient volume of airborne PM for proper speciation analysis. Dr. James J. Schauer and his team will develop methods for the detection and quantification of a wide range of trace metals, nonpolar, and polar organic species in low-volume PM samples.
Description:
This research will examine methods with the high sensitivity and low limits of detection needed to analyze a wide range of chemical species in particulate matter collected with personal samplers. Dr. Schauer and colleagues will develop sensitive methods to detect trace metals, nonpolar organic compounds, and polar organic compounds in personal samples collected in exposure studies. The methods researched by these investigators in this study will be useful to researchers seeking to gain greater insight into the relationships between the components of inhalable particulates and their health effects.